Rain, rest and a serious lack of chocolate

Im writing from Hyderabad now. We arrived this morning round 3 am at the place of a friend of Anil. He offers us his appartement for free. Its a very nice apartment and we will stay here for 3 nights and three days. Tomorrow we will do another excursion to ICRISAT an institute.





Yesterday we were in Utnoor. A small village where solidardad supports a project of organic cotton growing. The farmers converted 2 years ago and this year they will sell their yield for the first time as certified organic. This will be certified by SKAL, the Dutch label for organic products. In this way the farmers earn more money and they don't have to purchase artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which are huge investments for these farmers. I find it really interesting to hear about this wonderfull kind of projects. It really makes me smile to see that there are people that despite the enormous polution in india, are doing their best to make things better for people and planet. And im not the only one smiling. When we asked the farmers if they were happy they converted, we didn't need our translator to hear the answer. about 20 big smiles appeared on the faces of the colourfully dressed women and the more sober dressed men.


It was a really nice village with open, nice and warm people that for the first time, didn't gave me the feeling that i was some kind of rare species in a Zoo. They showed us their fields, we dirtied our shoes on the last moment in the rich clayey soil and went back to the car.





Contrary to the day before, John managed not to put his feet in the shit. That certain day he was warned by an Indian guy ' watch out, shit' when he stepped into something smelly that defenitely was not from the farm animals...





We went back to the office where we could freshen up a bit and went with one big car and a small one to Hyderabad. Because the cars were too small to also put the luggage inside, it was put on the roof... Too bad the driver didnt got the purpose of our raincovers and placed our bags with them facing down, making our backpacks into perfect fish-bowls. Despite several times of asking for plastic cover, there was no plastic available and the drivers seemed to lazy to make it into an effort to search for some. We decided to hope it would stay drie.


Ofcourse it didnt (its the rainy season *duh*) And after a while of driving in a nice monsoon rainfall we asked again. And again no response. they said there was no plastic available at this time of night. So at least we convinced them to turn the bags around to prevent them of getting more wet. The rest of the way we had quite some rain and i was really angry at the drivers for their non-caring behaviour for our luggage.


In the sleeping place it turned out that only some trousers, the lonelyplanet and some books got a bit moisty so i was releaved it wasnt that bad. My luggage stayed quite dry so i was quite lucky.

We had some nice Biryani for lunch (typical rice dish for this area) and now i'm here, in a small inernetcafe. As a last surprise i have some nice pictures. the two above ones are at the farm yesterday. The one with the dot on my forehead is at the themepark where i ate my dheli-belly food and below there is the Taj-Mahal group picture and a cockroach in our Hotel sink *eeeek* :P
I'm really craving for chocolate, but they don't sell any proper stuff here... together with crispy salad thats what i miss most of the dutch food. And all my dropjes are gone by now... But for dinner and lunch the indian food is too good to be true!

write to you soon!